


Waxing And Waning

by UliKulele



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Returns, Chronic Illness, Chronic Pain, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, disabled post-serum!Steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 02:41:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17674895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UliKulele/pseuds/UliKulele
Summary: The supersoldier serum was a marvelous thing that relieved Steve Rogers of any of his past ailments.Equipped with a body superior to that of anybody else, he became the hero we all know and love.Or so everybody thought. The truth was somewhat less glamorous: while Steve did gain strength and vitality,the serum was not without side-effects. He has simply learned to live with it and enjoy the good parts of his improved physique.Enter a winter soldier who is determined to make sure that his former friend takes care of himself like he ought to.





	Waxing And Waning

**Author's Note:**

> What do you do when you live with chronic pain?  
> You burden your favourite characters with it, of course. 
> 
> I will use this opportunity to tell all of you to have a nice day!

It seemed like a cruel stroke of fate that, even after having been relieved of most of his ailments by the super soldier serum, Steve still had to put up with regular migraines.

At first, they attributed the frequent attacks to his rapid change and reassured him that it would pass. In retrospective, Steve realised that there was not much else they could have done seeing as his newly acquired swift-as-lightning metabolism made regular painkillers pretty much useless anyway. 

As more and more time went by however, it became apparent that this particular issue was more persistent than anticipated. Being frozen for about seventy years had seemingly only worsened it, too. -Although there was a slight chance that he was only more aware of it now that he had a whole team of doctors constantly prodding him and giving him advice on how to improve his lifestyle courtesy of a Mr Tony Stark. He was recommended to keep a pain management diary to identify what triggered the attacks, but all it accomplished was drawing resignated sighs out of Steve whenever he had to add up how many days of the past month fell victim to his last remaining ailment (Usually they ended up in the double digits which to Steve directly translated to nearly half his life spent feeling frankly horrible). 

If it was just regular headaches, he might have been fine, Steve thought. Steve had dealt with a fair amount of pain in his life, in fact he couldn‘t remember a time when it wasn‘t a major part of his daily routine due to his poor health. The nausea and sensory overload however, those he could have easily done without. And then there were the auras that gave him a stammer one day, phantosmia another and yet another day made him so profoundly confused that he even failed at basic tasks such as buttering his breakfast bun like he had this morning.

Today was a particularly rough one. Steve had gone to bed with a slight buzz inside his skull that had reared its head and turned into a massive monster wreaking havoc in his head within hours of waking up. His stomach churned constantly, yet every movement of his head, however slight, increased the throbbing tenfold, so that he had eventually given up on moving back and forth between the bathroom and his bed and thus just flopped down onto the tiled floor next to the toilet. Here he was, in the dark (JARVIS had kindly switched off the light that had assaulted Steve‘s eyes so terribly), his head propped up on a small stack of towels and quietly considering what he had done to deserve this incredibly shitty lot.

 _Why couldn‘t I have kept something else? I could have stayed colourblind. That never bothered me much._ Steve thought to himself. Though then again, he remembered his profound astonishment that first time he had seen in colour. He thought that the world had never been more beautiful. And that he had missed out for so long. How unfair was it then that after finally being granted healthy vision everything he looked at hurt. Maybe his brain just wasn‘t equipped to deal with that much visual information and, huh, wasn‘t that an interesting theory as to why his noggin hated him so much. What a shame that he couldn‘t adequately contemplate this because every new wave of pain made him lose his train of thought.

Maybe it was also his improved hearing. Steve went from being deaf in one ear to hearing superior to any other human being (well, any regular human being, weird mutations or genetic manipulations that are undoubtedly out there unaccounted for) and then he was catapulted into another century that was far louder on top of that. He tried to adjust as best as he could but eventually he asked Tony to install noise-cancelling insulation throughout his entire section of his tower to at least give him some relief while he was at home. (Though the flood of jokes and innuendos that followed almost made him regret it. In the end it felt like a small price to pay for some peace and quiet.)

It wasn‘t just migraines either. It seemed unfathomable to Steve how he could be fine fighting alien invasions and actual Nazis (of all the things that could have lasted throughout history why had it to be them?) and heal up so quickly he hardly even registered the pain but then on other days he would be overcome by all-consuming fatigue and pain spread throughout his entire body like lead for no discernable reason. 

The first time it happened, back in the war, they said it was just pains associated with him growing into his new body, although in hindsight Steve was pretty sure that they must have secretly expected him to die, rendering their experiment a failure. He survived, however, and, since the scientists back then could not find a thing wrong with him, was deemed perfectly healthy. Eventually he just stopped talking about it and did his darndest to just enjoy his new-found health because, all things considered, he was still better of than beforehand and wouldn‘t have wanted to risk losing what he had through yet another experimental treatment that might as well kill him.

During his first few weeks or so in this new time Steve hardly even thought about the strange pains. He was achy, sure, but that was to be expected after crashing a plane and getting frozen for several decades. At the few occasions where his past sores crossed his mind, he almost dared to hope that they were a thing of the past entirely. This turned out to be a terrible misconception when one morning he woke up after a restless night of sleep not only hurting all over but also so confused that he could no longer make any sense of his new surroundings. 

Steve still shivered whenever he thought of his first flare-up in this century. His memories of it were somewhat blurry, but he could still recall getting very scared at some point. Usually Bucky had always been with him when he was sick before. When he woke up on his own he did not remember that had lost him or how much time had passed since then. This entire time he thought that Bucky must have gone away but he would come back. Bucky always came back. 

He waited and waited and when Bucky didn‘t show up he thought that something must have happened to him on his way home. People got mugged all the time and Bucky‘s way home from the docks did by no means lead him through the nice parts of town. If only he didn‘t have to work that much! It was all Steve‘s fault for being too sick to earn his own money regularly. All he had were his art comissions every now and then and even those were few and far in between. It was egoistical of him to let Bucky work for the both of them and now it was his fault that Bucky wouldn‘t come home.

It was only then that Steve remembered the war and a while longer still before he realised that he wasn‘t in their dingy little flat from the fourties anymore. He spent what felt like ages searching his unfocused mind for the details that would make sense of this whole situation. 

When he finally dug out and reassembled the right memories, it was like everything crumbled around him all over again. He remembered how he had found Bucky and lost him shortly after. The crushing realisation that he would never see his best friend again was suddenly so fresh -like the fall had happened just moments ago. He grieved the loss of the most important person in his life anew there and then. 

How much more time could they have had together if it hadn‘t been for the war? Steve knew that it wouldn‘t have surprised anyone back in the day had he, always ailing and oh-so delicate, died young. Perhaps Bucky would have made a better life for himself once he had the money he used to divide between the two of them for himself. Maybe he would have settled down with one of the nice girls he always brought home if Steve hadn‘t been a constant burden. Looking at it this way, Steve stole Bucky‘s life away from him and then failed to save it when he had the chance to. Wasn‘t that the least he could have done?

It wasn‘t just Bucky he lost, either. Missing out on seventy years had robbed him of his friends, his familiarity with his own home, of the knowledge needed to fit back in with everybody else. That first flare-up doubled as a reminder of his total isolation in a world that was not really his own anymore.

Once Fury and the others took notice of something being off with him, Steve was once again back to being assessed by all kinds of different doctors to restore his superhuman health and most importantly his usefulness as an asset to SHIELD. He underwent all kinds of tests and scans and saw more specialists than he cared to remember, ceaselessly amazed at all the new fantastical machinery he got to see in the process. 

Despite his utter fascination with the wonders of modern medicine that could have likely spared him a lot of suffering in his youth had they already been around back then, Steve was mildly frustrated at the lack of meaningful results it produced. 

Eventually, a nice general physician poked him in several places (that embarrassingly hurt way more than they ought to seeing as he was Captain America being jabbed lightly by a lady that looked like she was half his size), then sat him down, explained a two-letter acronym to him and told him that there was no one medication, no cure to his condition but that he was not the only one who lived with a condition such as this. She said that with a few life-style changes he may be able to manage his pain better though. 

Steve was elated to get some clear guidance on how to cope with his symptoms at first (and he still remains grateful to this day), but soon had to realise that he couldn‘t implement all of them quite as easily as he had hoped. While he had no problems sticking to his humble little exercise regime seeing as the novelty of being able to actually participate in sports after a lifetime of being too sick to do so still fueled his enthusiasm, things like cutting out stress were a whole different story.

For one thing, Steve didn‘t sleep well. While he was being told that insomnia was a common symptom of his condition, he couldn‘t help but feel incredibly wound up by it anyway. Then there were the constant missions and life-or-death scenarios inevitably affecting him. Steve was lucky that his newly enhanced body could withstand his missions in spite of the constant undercurrent of pain seizing through it, a feat that most other sufferers of a condition like this would have likely found a lot more difficult, but more often than not it later took its vengeance by rendering him completely immobile throughout the next flare.

His ailment came and went like the tides. He got used to the low burning background hum of it spreading through him. Sometimes he would have a few good weeks were he would feel completely fine and he appreciated and treasured those wholly because he didn‘t dare to hope that he would escape it anymore. 

Most of the time the pain would be a nuisance but manageable. He worked through it as best as he could and was fairly functional overall although he felt the strain of his constant attempt at appearing healthy wearing him down a lot. He tried to reason with himself that at least this was still much better and more stable than what his health used to be like before the war. -In and of itself he was granted a great boon.

Then at other times -and luckily those were usually in the minority compared to his good times- he was in absolute agony. At his worst, Steve could hardly get up or even form a coherent thought. His mind would fog over so that the only thing he knew for sure during those flare-ups was that he was desperate for them to stop. On top of that, his mood would usually plummet downwards so that he was depressed with hardly any capability to do something about it to pick himself back up. 

Today was an alright day as far as general body pain went. Nonetheless, the migraine was unrelenting and cruel. Steve had tried to take some of the painkillers made especially for him but hadn‘t been able to keep them down. He should have eaten before trying to take them. This however was easier said than done seeing as the thought of eating anything at all seemed revolting to his churning stomach. 

_If only Bucky were here right now..._ Steve thought, like what must have been dozens or perhaps even a hundred times before. It was an illogical thought, seeing as there was precious little Bucky could have done to actually alleviate him from his condition. His mere presence could have served as a great comfort though and Steve missed him greatly. 

Sometimes, Steve still pictured him the way he stood bent over their little kitchen stove to make some soup for Steve when he had come down with pneumonia one particularly nasty winter. When he closed his eyes Steve could still remember the way the light of the weakening November sun illuminated Bucky‘s lithe frame as it poured in through their badly insulated window they had taped shut with newspapers in an attempt to keep some more warmth in. 

Bucky had actually brought in a meagre helping of proper meat from God knows where to make the soup stock from. He gave all of it to Steve to provide him with proper sustenance and hopefully help his health get back on track. In the meantime all that Steve could think of at the time was that that good meat would go to waste if he would end up dying over the next few days.

Steve survived, however, and he had Bucky to thank for that. His best friend had spent countless hours making him food, keeping him warm and keeping him company. He had even used some of his hard-earned savings to buy Steve some proper medication. -If he hadn‘t unceremoniously shoved a spoon full of the stuff into Steve‘s mouth when he wasn‘t expecting it, the latter would have certainly insisted that he should take it back to the store rather than wasting his money like that.

Even after Steve had acquired his new body and his strange bouts of agony were still a mystery, Bucky stuck by his side. Steve had tried to hide it from the other soldiers as to not lower their morale, but Bucky saw right through it. The first time Steve couldn‘t get up from his cot due to feeling absolutely miserable, Bucky had just waltzed straight in and started coddling Steve as though he was still the 90-pound kid from Brooklyn that suffered of asthma and just about every other illness one could have possibly had back in the fourties.  
Steve heaved a heart-felt sigh as he turned onto his side and pulled his knees towards his chest in an attempt to get comfortable on his bath mat. He frequently contemplated the loss of his best friend when he felt ill. While he made some great friends he loved dearly in this new century he knew what the kind of friendship he and Bucky had, forged by dire need, fierce loyality and unconditional support, can never be simply replaced. He did know some people he felt similarly about- most recently Sam who had an unmatched sense for when Steve needed space and when he needed someone to take him places as a sort of pick-me-up. 

Steve quickly realised that these kinds of close friendships were all unique and would all hurt terribly to lose. None of them could replace the other. This realisation only fueled his existential dread of outlasting everyone he loved. He did it before and felt in every piece of his very being that he could not do it again. Perhaps they could make his body last but failed at providing him with the mental capacity to deal with suffering through this grief that felt like it could have lasted him several life times.

Going down this rabbit hole while lying on the floor alone in the dark seemed like a harrowing idea, so Steve tried to momentarily distract himself by turning back onto his back and stretching his limps as far as he could. His head throbbed in protest, but his muscles rejoiced at the new position after being forced into a bent position for that long. Maybe it was time to try and have a shower at least.

Suddenly, Steve paused in mid-motion. He was overwhelmed by a strange sense of something being off. He remained completely still as he tried to make out what brought this on. Just as he was about to accept that he was wrong and everything was as it should be, he saw a weird spark from the corner of his eyes. 

There was light pouring in from underneath the doorcrack. Steve was certain that he had closed all the doors and switched off the lamps on the corridor leading up to the kitchen earlier to prevent the light from hurting his eyes even slightly. (Oh the pleasures of enhanced vision along with photosensitivity!) This, of course, meant that somebody must have opened them after Steve had entered the bathroom.

Most of the people in the tower disqualified because their steps were simply too loud for Steve not to notice them in an otherwise completely silent flat. There was a chance that it could have been Natasha, but she knew better than to enter Steve‘s flat unannounced without greeting him afterwards at least. This left him with the terrifying possibility that somebody else, someone he didn‘t know, had somehow gained access to this part of the tower.

Steve instantly started preparing himself mentally for a fight. His migraine had him at a disadvantage, so he had to think this through carefully before taking the next step. By the angle and brightness of the light he deduced that it was most likely to come from the kitchen and living area directly opposite the bathroom. This meant that whoever was in there would likely have a direct line of view to the bathroom door. 

Steve briefly surveyed his mind for possible weapons within his reach. As it was, his body was hardly protected as he hadn‘t changed from his sleeping attire, a t-shirt and boxer shorts, and his shield and pretty much the entire rest of his fighting gear were stored away in his bedroom. 

All he could come up with as a means of self-defence for now was a pair of scissors that he kept in his first aid kit under the sink. Their tip was likely too blunt to stab someone, but perhaps he could jab them into some nerve points or use the blades to cut. If he played his cards right and managed to distract whoever it was that snuck into his flat maybe Steve would be able to take one of their weapons. He wasn‘t too optimistic however as anyone who managed to break into Stark Tower and walk into Steve‘s accomodation unnoticed must be highly skilled. He almost hoped that Natasha just decided to ignore his privacy boundaries for once.

Once he had retrieved the scissors he silently made his way to the door where he stood and listened at the keyhole for any signs of movement. Steve thought that he could hear something, a very faint scrapping noise, but he couldn‘t quite place it. It made him all the more certain though that there must be someone or something in this flat with him.

Figuring that there was not much else he would be able to discern from in there, Steve braced himself, opened the door and made a run straight into the kitchen, scissors firmly clasped in his right hand. 

There were certain things Steve anticipated when preparing himself to try and overpower a potential home intruder; getting stabbed, hit, kicked or shot were among them. Seeing someone hunched over his stove peering into a pot was not. The shock only settled in when that person looked up and a pair of blue eyes met his own.

Steve barely managed to stop in time to avoid barreling straight into the kitchen counter. He half-expected to get struck but still all he managed to do was stand there gaping at the intruder who continued stirring serenely. 

For a moment, Steve thought that he was hallucinating. He would occasionally have problems seeing during bad patches of his ailment. He never imagined a whole person though. Steve doubted somehow that his mind could replicate something this perfectly but then again, if it could, he probably wouldn‘t be able to tell.

For yet another moment he wondered whether he had dreamt and woken up and was back in the past. Maybe Steve had another bad fever and imagined the war and losing Bucky, getting frozen and finding Bucky just to lose him again. 

This wasn‘t Bucky as he remembered him, though. There was recognition in this man‘s eyes but he lacked the easy smile he used to give Steve whenever he would enter the room like this. This person had a facial expression that doubled as armour. The set of his shoulder was that of a man constantly ready to strike or run. Nevertheless, this was Bucky right here in flesh and blood. Some more of it in some places, Steve thought, as his gaze briefly swept the expanse of muscles that spanned his chest. Some less in other places, he added remorsefully, as his eyes came to rest on the metal fingers on the kitchen counter inches from the knife block.

The silence was suffocating. That itself was proof of how different things were now compared to back then. Steve and Bucky used to be able to spend days lounging about reading their respective books in complete silence without ever growing uncomfortable. When Bucky made no motion that indicated any intention to hurt him, Steve dared to look around some more to take in the full absurdity of the situation.

“What- what are you doing over there?“ Steve winced slightly at the awkward greeting. Couldn‘t he have come up with something less...like that?

“Cooking.“ Bucky said drily with a half-shrug. And indeed, he was. Steve only now managed to glance into the pot himself. He recognised the semolina porridge he bought on a whim a little while ago out of nostalgia just to shove it in the very back of his cupboard. Somehow he had been overcome by the fundamental dread that even this wouldn‘t be anything like what his mother made. He had felt like he couldn‘t have handled that. And now here was Bucky, like a vision from times long past, preparing a meal Steve hadn‘t eaten in decades.

“I...can see that.“ Steve paused briefly. Bucky replied by staring at him blankly. Steve cleared his throat. “Why are you cooking _here_ though?“

“It‘s what I used to do. You are sick.“ Bucky paused for a moment looking down at the backs of his hands. “Should I not be doing this?“

“No, no. I mean yes.“ Steve rushed to say. He felt like saying the wrong thing now would scare Bucky off again. “What I meant to say was that I am not sure _why_ you are doing that now? I mean, you were gone for a while and I am glad to see you but why did you come here and start cooking of all things?“

There was another beat of silence as Bucky switched off the stovestop and moved the pot aside to cool down. His voiced sounded choppy, like he was still getting used to speaking, as he answered. “When I was with Hydra, I was an asset. I had a purpose. Now Hydra is gone and the parts that aren‘t gone I have killed. I don‘t know what my purpose was before Hydra. I don‘t think that I remember everything. I remember I used to do this, though. So this is what I‘ll do until I remember what else used to give me purpose.“

Steve was yet again stunned into silence. “Is this for me?“ He immediately kicked himself mentally. Way to go, Rogers, of all the relevant things you could say today you only ask about stupid things.

Bucky nodded decisively as he began to pull out some bowls from under the counter. “You are sick. You should eat.“

Steve‘s stomach churned. This might become a problem. “I don‘t think I can eat this.“

Apparently in disagreement, Bucky forcefully shoved a bowl of porridge towards Steve‘s side of the counter. 

“Bucky, I am not that sick, you know.“

“You always used to say that. Just because I forgot some things doesn‘t mean that I am stupid.“

Steve looked up in surprise. There was almost something like a smile in Bucky‘s voice though the quirk of his mouth was so miniscule that Steve might as well have imagined it. Nevertheless, he took the bowl and a spoon Bucky produced from a drawer (with a confidence that made Steve briefly wonder how long he must have spent spying on Steve‘s flat to find everything at the first try) without any further protest. Somehow he felt like a bit of the old smugness was radiating off of Bucky as he took the first spoonful.

As he ate, he continued to look at Bucky who in turn probed Steve with a glare like he half-expected him to cheat by making his porridge disappear elsewhere. They sat quietly until Steve suddenly asked: “So, what are you going to do now? Are you going to find a new purpose?“ There was much more he wanted to ask: whether Bucky wanted to stay with him, whether he thought that they could go back to being comrades and perhaps even friends, where Bucky had been since they overthrew Hydra, whether he felt just as overwhelmed with things since he became a supersoldier. Steve didn‘t dare to ask any of them for now. Throughout all his thoughts was strung a silent plea. _Please stay here. Please don‘t leave again._

Bucky seemed to mull it over for a moment. Or at least he didn‘t answer straight away. His face gave away precious little about what his precise thoughts were. Then he furrowed his brows. “I am not done here yet. My obligation used to be to make sure that you are taken care of when sick. You aren‘t taking care of yourself. So I will.“

Steve‘s first impulse was to disagree with that statement out of spite but he only pushed his empty bowl back towards Bucky with a look that was meant as a silent request for some more food. His head still throbbed but his stomach felt slightly better at least. As he began to dig into his second helping he looked up at Bucky and smiled. The semolina really didn‘t taste anything like back in the day. But maybe that was okay anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> So...this was a hot mess. I started writing this about a month ago and thought it would be slightly shorter, but here I am, I guess.  
> Idk, I just thought that it would be...cool (? that doesn't seem like the right word) to think about the possibility of the super soldier serum not being as perfect as everybody thinks.
> 
> This is intended as a one-shot but I might add another chapter or perhaps another work in the same AU later, depending on how you guys like this and/or whether I will have enough time for that. 
> 
> I hope you all had a good start into the New Year btw! I know I am late to the party, but boy do I believe in all of you to meet all your goals this year. Go you!


End file.
